y.
His whole song was a powerful anaesthetic, and many at the table did
not know the meal was over till the steward woke them up.

One among our crowd who really mattered was a tall, gloomy, dyspeptic
man, hard to approach, but once known he never failed to harp on his
favorite string,--the old masters and the Barbizon school of painting.
This man had all the ready veneer of the art connoisseur. He used to
talk by the hour about the great pictures he had seen, and gave each
artist a descriptive niche for what he thought him famous: such as, the
_expression_ of Rubens; the _grace_ of Raphael; the _purity_ of
Domenichino; the _correggiosity_ of Correggio; the _learning_ of
Poussin; the _air_ of Guido; the _taste_ of Coraceis, and the _drawing_
of Michelangelo. This, of course, was all Greek to most of us, but it
raised the tone of the smoking-room and enveloped the entire ship in a
highly artistic atmosphere which no odors from the galley could
overcome. Incidentally I may say, however, he didn't know all about
them, for one day a wag set a trap for him by saying he had had a fine
bit of Botticelli at dinner.

"My dear sir," exclaimed our "authority," "Botticelli isn't a cheese;
he was a famous fiddler!"

"I have always had an impression he was an old master," said another
passenger, who was an amused listener.

It is impossible for any large body of travelers to escape the man who
by every device tries to impress his fellows with the idea that he is a
Mungo Park on his travels, and so our harmless impostor had his
"trunkage" plastered with labels from all parts of the world, sold to
him by hotel porters, who deal in them. He wore the fez, of course,
and sported a Montenegrin order on his lapel; he had Turkish slippers;
he carried a Malacca cane; he wrapped himself in a Mohave blanket and
he wore a Caracas carved gold ring on his four-in-hand scarf. But his
crowning effort was in wearing the great traveling badge, the English
fore-and-aft checked cap, with its ear flaps tied up over the crown,
leaving the front and rear scoops exposed. Not all of the passengers
carried this array of proofs, but many dabbled in them just a little
bit. It doesn't do, however, when assuming this role to have had your
hair cut in Rome, New York, or to have bought your "pants" in Paris,
Texas, for if you are guilty in those matters you will give the
impression of being a mammoth comique on his annual holiday.

The dear lady who de